By Adebola Feyikemi Adedokun
THE museum, through its educational services and training, has successfully empowered women, especially those with special needs, police officers’ wives, market women, career women, and women in politics, among others. This track record of success instills confidence in the proposed approach of using cultural heritage as a means of entrepreneurship.
It must be noted that women often face tough socio-economic challenges despite all the efforts to empower them by the relevant authorities.
However, in achieving this objective, particularly with the current economic realities, a new suggested approach by museum professionals is to use cultural heritage as a means of entrepreneurship.
Cultural entrepreneurship is an emerging discipline that examines how cultural products such as arts, theatre, literature, and cultural activities like sports, music, food, and film events impact the growth of local, national and global economies.
It can be defined as the unique activities of establishing cultural businesses and bringing to market cultural and creative products and services that encompass cultural values but have the potential to generate financial revenues.
For instance, a group of women in a rural community could start a pottery business, using traditional techniques to create unique and marketable products. It can be an efficient approach when considering communities embedded in their culture.
What makes cultural entrepreneurship worthwhile is that women engaged in producing arts and crafts get to express their culture and ways of life, and importantly, earn a living through selling their products, thereby contributing to their household income and the local economy.
Generally, women tend to be more involved in craft-making because of cultural gender norms. Making arts and crafts is often a route for women to self-empower and can become a significant source of income for them.
The museum has a more significant role to play amid this harsh economy in Nigeria by involving women in their community in cultural entrepreneurship. They can include women in their exhibitions and sales of artistic works and even provide training facilities.
Museums can help women in craft production, like bead making, soap making, pottery, wood carving, mat making, sculptures, baskets, weaving, drawing, etc, to improve their production to international standards and help them sell to their visitors.
Museums can play a pivotal role in supporting women’s entrepreneurship by exhibiting women’s creative works, collecting and preserving their products in their collections, and providing a space where these products can be sold. This active involvement of museums can inspire the audience with the potential impact of their support.
Museums can involve women in their activities, using their products in exhibitions and publications to highlight creativity and engage them in training and workshops.
Through the efforts of museum professionals, the museum can help develop women in creative arts to emerge in creativity, cultural arts, and aesthetics and add more beauty and economic value to their products.
Museums should play their roles in assisting these women to showcase their products.
Museum officials should also help interpret their products to the larger society through the internet, and all other social media means.
Museums can license women in this category to make their products available and accessible to tourists visiting Nigeria and even in the diaspora.
It must also be realised that one of the efforts to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to empower women. As a result, museum professionals should put in every effort to help women’s entrepreneurship through cultural arts.
Adedokun is the Chief Museum Education Officer at the National Museum, Osogbo
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